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During the Italian Renaissance, expert knowledge was still by and large handcrafted. The machines Leonardo Da Vinci created were, to him (I guess), just additional examples of more and more “artworks” created as piece works, contract work done as “paid gigs”.

Yet even with contemporaries such as Gutenberg, a newfangled approach was appearing: the first kindling of what Edward Bernays would later reflect upon as elements of market forces. In the span of those five centuries that separated the beginning Renaissance from the modern invention of so-called “Public Relations” (PR), numerous revolutions of scientific thought and institutions would slowly transform a world of individual faces into a faceless industrial society. But maybe Bernays did not wish to upset his audience, so instead he sold them a more human and down-to-Earth story.

Yet by the Twentieth Century, the Albert Einsteins of the world could participate in institutions such as Princeton University. Likewise, so could also what would later become popularised as “Fortune 500” companies — indeed, more and more such corporate institutions are even encouraged to do so. In those intervening five centuries, the world had fashioned innumerable marketplaces for uncountable kinds of information, and this process of institutionalisation is (I believe) what the first chapter of Edward Bernays’ “Propaganda” is all about.

Over the course of the Twentieth Century, I feel the role of personal brands (such as Albert Einstein or some prominent leader of a publishing corporation) diminished, and instead the role of corporate brands increased … such that the knowledge, expertise and talent that had in previous centuries been concentrated in individuals such as Da Vinci and Gutenberg was gradually transferred to institutional organizations, as these organizations increasingly acquired the increasingly loyal (to the company or corporation) support of expert workers, talented designers and so on. Ultimately, we no longer needed to be able to assess the quality of machines by evaluating the workmanship contributed to every individual part. Neither would we (reasonably) be so foolish as to trust the endorsement of any product from any celebrity (as Bernays argued). Increasingly, reasonable people would trust corporate brands if and when the corresponding corporations appropriately managed all the factors involved in the production of goods and services they produced.

By the turn of the millennium, there were so many corporations (and corporate brands) that in almost any market segment several corporations would stand in direct competition with one another. Increasingly, the distinguishing characteristic (or “Unique Selling Proposition”) of any successful brand will become more a matter of appropriately suiting the consumer (rather than some more general “warm and fuzzy” feeling such as happiness or some simple albeit abstract concept of excellence).

The comparatively simplistic approaches used in the Twentieth Century are simply no longer well-suited to addressing the complexities facing both consumers and producers today. Never before has the world been so immensely globally interconnected. We are no longer simply “afflicted” by global pandemics — we now obviously produce them, too.